The word gerrymander was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the U.S. The primary goals of gerrymanning are to maximize the effect of supporters’ votes and minimize the effects of opponents’ votes.
About Gerrymandering in brief
Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group. It is most commonly used in first-past-the-post electoral systems. Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. The word gerrymander was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the U.S. The term has negative connotations and gerrymandered is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process. The resulting district is known as a g Gerrymander. The word is also a verb for the process. Since the letter g of the eponymous Gerry is pronounced with a hard g ɡ as in get, the word was originally pronounced ˈɡɛrimæ’dr, with a soft g. However, over time, other names have been suffixed with suffixed to tie to a particular politician or group to minimize the effect of opponents’ votes. Examples are the 1852 \”Henry-mandering\”, “Tully-mander’s” and “Perry-Mander,’’ and “Bjelke-Manders’,” ‘‘’ ’ ‘Gerry’ ’, ’”, ‘gerrym’, ’d’ or ’gerrymanders’ is now used to refer to a partisan effort to tie the vote of a particular political party to a single person or group, such as in Northern Ireland where boundaries were constructed to guarantee Protestant Unionist majorities.
The primary goals of gerrymanning are to maximize the effect. of supporters’ votes and minimize the effects of opponents’ votes. The main purpose is to achieve desired electoral results for a certain party or demographic, such. as a political, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, or class group. The top-left diagram in the graphic is a form of cracking where the majority party uses its superior numbers to guarantee the minority party never attains a majority in any district. A political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head that supposedly resembled the oddly shaped district. The cartoon was most likely drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, an early 19th-century painter, designer, and engraver who was living in Boston at the time. The original woodblocks survive and are preserved in the Library of Congress. The creator of the term \”gerrymander\”, however, may never be definitively established. Historians widely believe that the Federalist newspaper editors Nathan Hale and Benjamin and John Russell coined the term, but the historical record does not have definitive evidence as to who created or uttered the word for thefirst time.
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This page is based on the article Gerrymandering published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
